


(Dreaming of) The Great Wide World

by quadrotriticale



Category: Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, POV sinbad, if i make more of these itll be more of a thing, the ship is only there if you squint!, theyre in love and dreamworks cant lie to me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 17:44:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14815907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrotriticale/pseuds/quadrotriticale
Summary: “I want my own ship,” you say, looking back out at the water, “I want to be able to go where I want, I want to do what I want, I want to see the world. I want to sail- way on past the horizon and I don't want to come back, you know, maybe the world's so big that I wouldn't ever run out of places to go."





	(Dreaming of) The Great Wide World

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this a billion years ago and just edited it to post. thanks i love this stupid movie

You’re 16, barely. As you sit on the dock, feet dangling out over the ocean, you feel like you’re here on borrowed time. You watch the ships come and go during the day, think about what it would be like to sail off beyond the horizon, away from Syracuse and the twelve cities, as far away as you can go. You don’t know what’s out there, you've thought about it and you've asked about it, but you have trouble believing what you can't see with your own eyes. You think that, to know something, you need to be able to confirm it, it's hard to take things on faith, sometimes. Proteus knows what's out there, you think. Proteus knows a lot of things, with his schooling and everything, and he's gone away before, on big ships that take him further than your eyes can see. Part of you wants to ask him, but most of you thinks it best to find out for yourself. 

Oh, you’ve been thinking about leaving for a while. And you will, you’re sure, you just need some last thing to push you out of the harbor. 

It’ll happen one day, sooner than you know, but today is not that day. 

Proteus joins you on the dock when the sun starts to set, sits down beside you with his legs crossed. 

“I thought I’d find you here,” he says, amicable and casual. You glance at him long enough to raise an eyebrow before turning your attention back to the ripples in the water. 

“The only other place I’d be is in a cell,” you tell him, half joking. He laughs anyway, a light airy thing that pulls the corners of your mouth into a smile no matter how hard you try to act aloof. 

“That would have been the next place I checked,” he jokes, bumping into your shoulder playfully. Part of you wants to lean into him, some small traitor in the back of your skull wants to set your head on his shoulder and watch the sun dip below the waves, but the rest of you wants to shove him into the water and laugh as he flails. You decide to do none of it, for now. “You’ve been down here a lot lately,” he continues. There’s some concern in his voice now, although he’s trying to sound nonchalant. You wonder if he understands why you sit out here.

“I’ve just been thinking a lot, mostly about what’s out there,” you start, gesturing to the horizon to show him what you mean before leaning back on your hands. “I’ve never been anywhere else, this city’s only so big. A guy’s gotta have something to dream about.”

“You’ll see it one day,” he says, and you’re sure you know what the rest of his thought was. ‘When you join the navy’ or something. That was always your dream, yours and his. You were going to join the navy, you were going to go sailing, you were going to be heroes in spectacular battles, you were going to be explorers, you've had it planned out since you were kids, playing in the streets with sticks as swords before he got so swept up in his duty. You were going to see the world, but always together. You got older, though. He’s a prince and you barely constitute a person. You’re pretty sure that was all nothing more than a child’s fantasy, something that never really had any hope."

“I know I will,” you tell him, “I just wish I could leave sooner, I'm a little claustrophobic here. It doesn’t seem as big as it used to.” You don’t tell him the part about running away, you don’t tell him the part about leaving him here to whatever royal duties he’s going to tie himself to. He wouldn’t run off with you even if you asked him to, and you’re almost okay with that. It’s a little easier to stomach than you think it should be. You want him by your side, of course you do, he's your best friend and most of your impulse control, but you want to break out, you want to get away from this place that's spent your whole life tying you down, and he's a part of that, he's a huge part of that.

He nods like he understands. The salt on the air leaves you feeling homesick and you don’t understand why. 

You sigh. He looks at you, curious, and you have to pretend you aren’t a little blown away by the way he looks in the reddish light of the setting sun. You avert your eyes. 

“I want my own ship,” you say, looking back out at the water, “I want to be able to go where I want, I want to do what I want, I want to see the world. I want to sail- way on past the horizon and I don't want to come back, you know, maybe the world's so big that I wouldn't ever run out of places to go. I’ve never- I've only been here- I want to know what’s out there," you gesture a little violently to the horizon, "you know? This isn’t the whole world, there has to be something… I don’t know, more? More than this.”

“There’s a lot more than this,” Proteus starts, “I’ve got a map, you know, but it’s not finished. The outlines just stop part way. And even then, the world looks huge. Syracuse, the twelve cities, even Rome- it’s all just a small part of everything, there’s so many places no one here has ever been. I could show sometime, if you’d like.”

You nod. You consider stealing it for moment longer than you should. “Yeah,” you say, “I’d like that.”

The two of you sit quietly while the sun starts disappear below the curve of the Earth. The wind picks up slightly, enough to blow your hair around a little more than you’d like, but it’s still warm. When you’re out here, you tend to stay until there’s nothing left of the sun and you can see the moon and the stars on the water. Proteus almost never stays with you that long. On calm nights, you almost can’t see the horizon. You like to think about what it’d be like in a ship in the middle of the ocean on a night like that, nothing to tell you where the sky begins and the planet ends except the wake from the ship. You think that might be what paradise feels like, but you don’t know, not yet. You’re barely sixteen and you’ve never left the twelve cities, barely even been out of Syracuse. You don’t suppose you know much about anything at all. 

The silence is comfortable, but you start to think about shoving him into the water again. You’ve done it before, pushed him off the end of the dock without any warning just to laugh at the way he squawks and flails when he hits the water. When you were younger, he used to scramble back up and try to shove you in as payback every time you did that, but he does it less and less the older he gets, and as much as it frustrates you, it doesn’t surprise you. He gets more straight-backed and princely with every passing year and it makes you uncomfortable. He was a lot more like you, as a child. Louder, scrappy, almost wild. A little like the ocean, you muse to yourself. You miss that. You know why he’s changed, but you can’t say you think it’s for the better. You feel like the city is taking everything that makes him Proteus and grinding it away until he's left with nothing but all the rules he's learned.

In the end, you spend a little too long staring at him while you think, and he catches your eyes, and on impulse you try to shove him in the water. He squawks, of course, like he always does, but he grabs you and holds on like his life depends on. Your death grip on the wooden planks of the dock do you no good, and he manages to pull you down with him. You (almost) shriek. You come up sputtering, laughing as you wipe the water from your face. He splashes you before he tries to make a break for the ladder, and you, of course, swim after him and tug him off of it, try to dunk him under the water. He’s laughing when he can breathe, swatting and kicking you at every opportunity, and you’re grinning wider than you have in a while. 

And this is okay, you think. If it stayed like this, happy as you are in the moment, you might not have a problem with staying in Syracuse. You might not even have a problem joining the navy, if it stayed like this. You know it won’t, though, you know you won’t stay this happy, and come tomorrow evening, you’re going to be watching the sun set again, day dreaming about what’s just beyond your line of sight. You want to know. You want to see it. Something will come along, something will drag you out into the world, and you think it’s going to come soon, too. Sooner than maybe you’d like, but you wouldn’t miss it for anything. Proteus is going to be angry with you, when he finds out you left, but you won’t be around to see it. He might be angry with you for a long time, but you think it’d be worse if he forgot about you entirely.

You could live with that, you think, if you could see the world. 

And maybe, if he still cared to see you, you’d come back one day and you’d tell him all about it.


End file.
